Okay, I finally managed to get the distro cd under 2 gig... burnt, it worked, succesfully installed but than started the problems:

when I get to the login screen, supply login and password I set while intalling it doesn't recognise them...

out of desparation I try the login/passwd I used on the original system and it works but still wont login - it gives problems... that old msg that it's ignoring .dmrc AND another that it lasted less than 10 secs... so I look at more info it gives something like libvfsgnome problems with permissions in creating user gnome folders....

so I go ctrl alt f1 and create a new user (that I originally wanted in the install), set the passwd and than it accepts the login but gives identical errors...

the new system DOES NOT WORK...

while I loaded the livecd it worked okay, I could see all my games are there....